The Safe and Easy Way to Buy and Sell Collectibles

Menu

Buyers: New Shipping Credit

We’ve been giving our sellers some love lately with The National special we’re currently running. You have just a couple more days to take advantage of it, so send your submissions in ASAP! Items must be postmarked by August 22nd.

Buyers, we have not forgotten you…

…Check out our new Store Credit program for buying in bulk on COMC.com!

It works like this:

For every 100 items a buyer has shipped from COMC.com within a calendar month, s/he will receive $5.00 in COMC Store Credit. And, the benefits add up.

Ship 100 cards = $5.00 COMC Store Credit

Ship 200 cards = $10.00 COMC Store Credit

Ship 300 cards = $15.00 COMC Store Credit…and so on, and so on…

On the first of every month, every account that qualifies will receive the Shipping Credit automatically. We actually started this program on August 1st, so you may have already noticed this Store Credit in your account for cards you had shipped during the month of July.

We always appreciate your input and feedback, as many of our new features come from the COMC Nation. Please feel free to leave any suggestions or ideas in the comments below. As always, we ask that you stay tuned to our blog and be sure to join us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

Post navigation

6 thoughts on “Buyers: New Shipping Credit”

Sounds like a nice bonus! I don’t remember receiving a bonus on the 1st of August, but I looked and I had 100+ cards send to me in the month of July. I may have overlooked the $5.00 payment, or perhaps my orders didn’t qualify for some reason. Either way, I wasn’t expecting it, so its not a big deal. But one suggestion I would make to go along with this bonus, is that those receiving a credit receive an email on the 1st of the month to kind of “announce” their monthly credit. Some buyers may not even realize they are getting this bonus, or that the program exists, so maybe by receiving an email it will prompt buyers to buy some extra cards in a month in the future, if it means receiving the credit.

Some things buyers really like include: free stuff, bulk deals, saving money, saving time. It would be nice if COMC could figure out a ways to continue to provide good value to its customers.

For free stuff, one possibility would be for sellers to be able to donate unsold cards to a pool of cards which would be included with outgoing packages. Possibly the seller would get some sort of rebate for donating the card. Possibly the buyer would be able to choose the freebie they get. Or maybe they could pay a lower packing fee like 15 cents for cards from that pool.

For bulk deals, it would be nice if COMC could come up with a kind of port sale, where a pile of cards is offered for sale as a lot, the and the cards have to be removed from the site, rather than flipped. For example, if a seller sent in a batch of 500 cards a year ago, and 200 cards are unsold, there should be some way to automatically make a port out of those 200 cards, without the seller paying $10 to list the port and without the buyer paying $50 to have the cards delivered.

Buyers also like to get a good deal. One possibility would be to have an option of putting lower-priced cards into a collective pool with (horrors) stock images or no images at all. The buyer could pay the same processing fee – 25 cents per card, or 20 cents for “bulk processing”, but the cards wouldn’t be scanned and the packaging fee would already be paid. Then if the seller marks the card at, say, 75 cents, the buyer would see 75 cents, not $1.

Along those lines, it would also be nice if COMC could figure out some way for the seller to pre-pay the packaging fee. I’d be willing to pay $20 for the packaging fee on the next 100 cards that are purchased at my full asking price and shipped off site. What I don’t want to pay is 25 cents packaging fee for every card which is in my account. When COMC invented the “shipping credits” last year, they made the “shipping credit” specific to the card which was purchased, rather than to the account. If you pay a shipping credit for card x, you have to apply it to card x. I want to pay a shipping credit for card x, and apply it to the next card out the door.

Buyers can also get a better deal if dealers are willing and able to cut their prices. COMC.com was launched over a year ago, and there still is no bulk repricer program. Many dealers want to cut their prices and they can’t. Some have resorted to running sale after sale after sale, but those get expensive at $3 per day plus 3% of sales, and even the sale prices get to be stale after a while.

As a seller, I’m also much more willing adjust the price of a card based on its past sales history. Ever since COMC introduced the “Sales History” feature, I’ve been adjusting thousands of prices, mostly lower, and I’ve been more willing to accept 50% offers on certain cards, particularly if they have no sales history. But it’s a pain in the butt to have to stop what I’m doing and gather up “history points”. In my opinion, I shouldn’t have to use any history points to see the sales history of a card which I already own. And even if I’m completely out of history points, I should be able to still see the number of cards which have sold, even if the price is obscured. The COMC “IQ Test” should spit out more history points than it does – 10 times or 100 times as many. My time is limited – on Earth as well as on COMC, and it shouldn’t be squandered on timewasters unless the timewaster is really fun. This one is not. I send cards to COMC so that I don’t have to spend all day identifying cards.

If you insist on having the COMC “IQ Test”, it should actually accomplish something useful. Right now, I see interesting cards that I might want to buy, but I can’t click on anything that takes me to the card being sold. At the very least, put some sort of link to the card, or list the sales price, or include a clickable link to the set name, or something. But if you want to scrap the whole thing and give everyone several million “history points”, that’s good too.

And since we’re on the subject of COMC price history, it’s high time that more info was added to the price history. When was the last sale? What was the average selling price? How many sales in the last year? How many cards have been sold of the player vs the number which are still on the site? How many cards have been sold from the set vs the number which are still on the site? Things like that would be much more useful than the highest price ever paid by the person most desperate to own the card at the peak demand for the card.

Another feature I’d like to see is for every single selling account to get one free Promotional Sale per month, on a day of the seller’s choosing. Right now, most of the Promotional Sales are the same cards being offered by the same dealers for the same prices. Sellers with smaller accounts are shut out of the process because it’s not worth $3 plus 3% of sales to run a sale (unless you’re blowing everything out and leaving the site permanently).

If everyone got a free sale every month, then every day there would be a couple dozen sales of fresh items at fresh prices. This would give buyers a reason to come back day after day after day, to check in on the sales. But it also wouldn’t overwhelm the site with people dumping cards at fire sale prices.